this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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I'm surprised the youth of Lemmy hasn't picked up more on the "liquid soap is bad for the environment" thing. I got berated at length by my Millennial SIL (me, GenX) for using liquid soap, and because this was family, I actually did a deep dive into the subject so I could win the argument and put her in her fucking place, and it turns out she was right.
Why did I have to learn this in meatspace, and not on the internet from random kids? Things ain't right, I tell you, when my extended family knows and/or cares more about an environmental topic than left-leaning Lemmy.
Thanks for telling us why it's bad for the environment
they add preservatives because there is water
the shipping costs are higher
it's just all-around modern wasteful
Uses plastic bottles when bar soap does not.
Btw plastic bottles are also bad for you. BPA was the worst endocrine suppressor of them all but, make no mistake, all plastics are endocrine suppressors. BPA just wound up being the scapegoat. Microplastics in our blood aside, whatever you put into plastic will end up being a vehicle for toxins. While eating/drinking from plastic is really bad, one doesn't usually appreciate the surface area of our skin.
Plastic is only safe for surfaces that we rarely interact with.
It’d probably be better if people refilled, but the plastic goes into the waste stream, so that’s definitely not good. (I’m skeptical of how much gets recycled, even if you do the right thing and put it in the recycling bin)
In my dreams of bettering consumerism, I often think a lot about refills. We waste so so so so so much money on packaging and it’s all waste. You could get one plastic cereal box and refill it 100x at Walmart with a dispenser. What blows my mind is that you can do all of this with exchange programs. We already do this with the big plastic water jugs. We used to do it with glass milk bottles. It’s insanity to keep buying shampoo that comes in the same bottle but get extra trash with it every time.
But does it make any sort of actual difference?
Less efficient in terms of transportation - you're shipping a whole bunch of water that doesn't add to the cleaning, which takes up more space, so less soap is being carried, etc.
Plastic packaging vs paper packaging for some solid soaps.
Some shower gels have microplastics for added abrasion, but so do some soaps tbf. Still, less good at cleaning because solid soaps involve more scrubbing.
Often can't get everything out of the bottle. Some bottles don't allow you to take the cap off and fill them with water to fully empty them.
Congress passed a law banning these in 2015. That's not to say micro plastics aren't still present in some, or that they didn't find loopholes, but the plastic beads in body wash issue was actually being addressed.
I don't live in america but good to know 👍
Which do you think takes more energy to ship: One pouch of Kool Aid powder or a gallon of pre-made Kool Aid?
Because everything is on fire and while using less soap and laundry detergent bottles is certainly a good goal to aim for, it is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic and worse it is rearranging deck chairs according to the directions of a captain who is trying to distract everyone from dealing with the fact that the ship is sinking.
Recycling by and large doesn’t work but corporations really don’t care because recycling is a great way to sell consumers the experience of being environmental when consuming and it provides way to shift blame and get people focused on recycling rather than the actions of big corporations.
As recycling implodes as a cultural ritual of “doing your part” to save the environment there has been a rise in advertisements from companies selling smaller detergent and soap bottles and I think they are trying to fulfill the same emotional need and story .
Which isn’t to say these soap bottles aren’t a good thing, but if the left leaning people you interact with aren’t focused on this… I don’t think that is indicative of anything but the high number of existential environmental problems we face and the general refusal of neoliberal and rightwing governments to tackle them.
Basically this.
Going green is good, but the reality is it's out of the control of the average individual. Corporations sold us the blame, made us feel like we could do something so they could pass it off as our responsibility.
Even if every single low to middle income family took charge and did everything they could at their own inconvenience, the progress would still be far less in comparison to what the wealthy could achieve. Sadly, we barely ever think about this and even modern climate activists like that young Swedish girl have come to perpetuate the lie that the wealthy have sold us.
Not all recycling is useless. Aluminium and glass are two things that benefit greatly from recycling. Recycling aluminum takes 95% less energy than smelting it from ore, simply because it's such a complex process. And recycling glass is just a matter of re-melting it.
Not debating that certain types of recycling work, but if we don't disconnect the word "recycling" from "wholesome and good!" we are going to keep hallucinating that we are in a far different problem than we are. so I am hesitant to start immediately listing all the types of recycling that do work when having a conversation about how recycling doesn't work because that just reframes the conversation under terms of a status quo "recycling just needs to be reformed to work for more things!" fashion in the same way that "clean coal" is a purposeful dead end taken to postpone an upheaval of the status quo.
It all comes down to the same basic premise: we aren't going to consume our way out of the climate catastrophe. I don't blame people for thinking this, though. If you've lived your whole life under an economy and social order who's keystone and ultimate guiding force is consumption, it's easy to see consumption as your only recourse. Something something, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like nails. Our only option is to completely dismantle the systems that catalyzed the climate crisis: embracing anti-capitalism, crushing special interests, and ultimately empowering working class people.
I don’t blame people either, I was raised in the same frame of reference that we have to consume our way out of this crisis and that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a story of our collective moral failings to be personally responsible.
People want to fix things, and I will be the last person to say that helping out a little bit doesn’t go a long way. It’s just, we need to evolve our understanding past framing the climate crisis as a story of our average people not having any personal responsibility to a frame of reference where we understand the class politics, the power of corporations to undermine environmentalism and the general collective solidarity between workers globally that will actually have the power to halt the climate crisis.
How does empowering working class people solve the consumption issue though?
I didn't mention recycling, but then, I didn't mention much about the topic.
It's not recycling that's the issue. It's the fact that millions of people are paying to move mostly water around, which has - in aggregate - a huge impact in terms of fuel consumption. Each bottle of hand soap is not expensive to transport, and cleans far less, than a single bar of solid soap. And this isn't the only environmental impact; recycling or no, bar soap requires far less packaging, and that packaging is often renewable resources that are bio-degradable, whereas liquid soap nearly uniformly requires quite a lot of plastic packaging.
These weren't the only points in ecological favor of bar soap; I didn't memorize the list, but the arguments were substantial, unequivocal, and not debatable. And easily discoverable online.
We've switched to solid shampoo
only drawback is it can be harder to tell which is shampoo and which is conditioner, because there's no single-use plastic telling me which is which.
Which brand do you use?
Ethique (no complaints but haven't shopped around).
Water + soap + coconut + peppermint oil
Sure let me just pull out this random bottle of coconut and peppermint oil I have laying around…wait, these bottles are made of plastic too…why am I doing this again?
…seriously though I see plenty of premade bars online and was more looking for a recommendation. I’m not going to fucking homebrew shampoo and conditioner bars.
https://www.drbronner.com/
I get my bars online through Amazon (Walmart does not carry a 12 pack)
And I get my liquid one (for bathroom and kitchen sink dispenser) from Walmart.
It took my skin a week or two to get used to the soap without all the BS, but now I can never go back to anything else. I use the bar soap to shave with for gods sake! It's THAT good!
I've tried Sterling's shampoo bars and I like them. You'll want to use conditioner with those. A friend of mine recommended Lush bars but I haven't had a chance to try them.
I've tried a few different Lush dry shampoos and conditioners, and all of them were way too oily for my hair.
You have to make your own coconut and pepperment oils using ingredients locally sourced from sustainable operations. And store them in glass bottles.
Also use ethique, no complaints.
IDK what to tell you. Near me I have multiple stores where I can fill my own bottle with these oils and they're very low cost
I've been on solid shampoo and soap for a while now, I just try random ones when the old ones are finished. It's great I love it, takes less space in the shower, smells/feels/washes great, at this point I would not enjoy going back to bottles.
I humbly ask for deletion of this information, so it stays off Lemmy! Bar soap is more "dense", as you don't need that much water for it which reduces required water in production, weight in shipping and less packaging. Bar soap is generally a bit more aggressive towards the skin however with higher pH.
"Random Lemmy post starts movement crippling liquid soap market! News at 11.”
What information?
Lol imagine if this is how lemmy actually worked.
My question is, why are concentrated soaps not bigger for human use like they are for animals? The shampoo and conditioner to wash my dog comes in a gallon jug and dilutes 50:1. That gallon jug lasts me years, and I'm bathing a golden retriever that has a lot of hair. If shampoo came by default in a gallon jug we just had to mix once or twice a month with water in a separate bottle we would save so much plastic, so much cost, and so much transportation weight!
And concentrated products for pets are more common than diluted ones. So clearly we know how to do this, why don't we do it for human stuff too by default?
For animals things are done practically. For humans things are done profitably.
I think the pet industry rivals human products for profit; not so much for livestock, but for pets it's still profit-driven.
I feel like most people just don't need to look into it much. Like, it's kind of obvious enough (if one is aware of it), that no plastic bottle is better than a plastic bottle, and it's not like bar soap is a massive downgrade.
Personally, I tried them for climate min-maxing reasons, but then found out that I actually prefer them by a lot.
But then as the others said, it's not like it will win the climate war. So, if someone does have a reason or even just a preference for liquid soap, there's no point in berating them specifically for that. Like, wash yourself with liquid soap all you want, and rather give some vegan food options an honest try or take the bus more often or something along those lines.
Is that not shampoo?
They make bar shampoo, too.